by Chris Radant

(Continued from page one)

Sleep like there's no tomorrow.

My next task was to impose a restful sleep over the excitement, jittery fatigue and disorientation. I tried to be ready for anything. I knew that being a p.a. was anything but glamorous. Still, I imagined myself becoming the darling of the crew, cracking dry, little jokes and being a solid comrade in the weird battle of moviemaking.

I got up at 3:00 a.m. to make a 4:48 call downtown. Due to a bad case of busy legs and head noise, I had only slept 2 hours of sleeping like there was no tomorrow, when my new travel alarm started to beep. Since the first day of shooting was at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, my initial job was to load crew members into airport-bound vans and count heads. I was instructed to make the vans leave on time to teach a lesson to dawdlers.

For these reasons, I believe I made a rather unlovely first impression upon the crew, chasing the set designer and sound men around, demanding names so I could check them off my list. In addition to sending off the vans every fifteen minutes, I was to receive and forward incoming pager messages, and then high-tail it to the airport to herd extras around the airport set.

Once at Baltimore-Washington International, I was also in charge of redirecting pedestrian traffic, delivering boxes of mail to crew members, phoning the production office with camera times, taking lunch orders for the stars, and of course, snagging the walkie-talkie crossfire that pertained to me. Oh, and also taking orders from everyone who knew I was a rookie. To say I was overwhelmed doesn't even come close. In fact, words fail me entirely.

I would compare it to volunteering at a hospital and being sent into the emergency room with handfuls of unmarked medications to treat dying patients...on live network TV. Oh, and all the patients were dressed just like the doctors, some of whom were sleeping on gurnies. And my real job is at Roto Rooter in Trenton. Kinda like that.

Despite my month-long preparation, a few lies told to Radio Shack employees ("yeah, I' been thinkin' about buying some walkie-talkies...can I handle some of yours?"), and a regimen of stamina-building ginseng and sublingual B-12, I was utterly unprepared for the job.

Part of it was my advanced age. For good reason, I was the only 45 year old p.a. there--and probably in the history of cinema. Part of it was the difficult location for the first 2 days. Part of it was that I couldn't tell the fake passengers from the real passengers from the crew members. I was yelled at by loved ones coming to greet passengers, and by tightly wrapped fear-of-flying patients who were not yet sedated for their trips. Another big problem was that I'm not clairvoyant.

Communication amongst the crew could've been better, but everybody was in over their heads, and we just had to get our shots and get the hell out of the way, before the airport powers booted us out and ruined everything. But some essential things were overlooked. For example, I understood that I would be given a pager and a cell phone and shown how to work them. This didn't happen. The pager was slipped into my hand on the set without a word of instruction. I didn't even know it didn't beep until I later began vibrating. By then, I was so disoriented that I took it to be a symptom of stress or a spiritual epiphany of some sort. Though a production manager at the office recited rather intricate instructions over the PAY PHONE (my cell phone was broken), I was barely able to follow her with people yelling in my headset and the flight announcements booming out and my beltline vibrating.

The broken cell phone was something no one on the set wanted to help me with, so I attempted to push through that problem by placing credit card calls at the pay phones, where I often had to stand in line while people screamed at me on my headset. Finally, I was given an 800 number for the office, which helped some.

We were all instructed to be in constant contact with Bob Wagner, the 2nd a.d. (assistant director). I wish now that I had known to ask what I was supposed to do when he was completely unavailable for stupid questions like, "Hey Bob--when you say, 'put Buzz on a van and send him to base camp,' who's Buzz, where are the vans and where/what is base camp?" Similar jargon problems occurred when I was told to help craft services break down and move. Was I looking for a cart where a guy dispensed scotch tape and scissors? Where was he moving to? Would he know? Turned out that craft services is the concession stand for the cast and crew. Whoever came up with 'craft services' for this was in the wrong business.

Nothing was ever clear to me. When I did find someone with whom I could clarify these mysteries, they were noticeably grumpy about answering. I can't say I blame them.

Then there was the time I heard Bob Wagner on the walkie-talkie, pleading for someone at Base Camp to "come in." I was there, and responded. He ordered me to, "Tell everyone at Base Camp there is a 20 minute warning." Right. So I took a deep breath and went around Base Camp, telling EVERYBODY (truckers, airport maintenance people, pedestrians, etc.) that there was a 20 minute warning. They all had a good laugh.

One of my fellow p.a.'s had told me to bring a duffle bag with indoor clothes in it. She said there'd be a room where we'd all keep our gear. But when I brought my duffle bag, script, shooting schedule, etc. to the set and asked Bob where to put it, he (bit his tongue and then) said he didn't know. The upshot of this was that I could barely keep track of where my own stuff was, and was eventually separated from it at a time when I needed to change out of my lovely and flattering foul weather gear.

Around 1:30 in the afternoon, which felt like my bedtime, I was handed a scribbled menu for the stars and told to take their lunch orders. But they were either working or had disappeared immediately after we broke for lunch. (They tend not to stick around and let the onlookers bug them for autographs.) I had no clue about where to find them, or for that matter, where to find my own lunch.

When I finally found catering, I had only enough time for 3 green beans and some lemonade, then they told us to go to the next set, wherever that was.

Unidentified people shoved boxes of "important mail" in my hands, saying the stars may have the most urgent messages. But when I attempted to deliver to the few people whose names I knew, I was told it was bad timing. In fact, no one seemed accessible for mail, the bulk of which I put in a safe place. The safe place then moved as I went off on other missions. The boxes went away too. About this, there was no one to ask. I had just fucked up. Everybody seemed to be my superior when they were assigning jobs to me, but never to answer questions I had. Nobody. I always had 6 missions going and no way to prioritize them.

At one point, I turned around and found myself staring at Jodie Foster, who said, "Hey--you're Chris? I was wondering which one you were! It's great to meet you!" But someone was screaming in my headset that they needed me somewhere, and so I have no idea what, if anything, I said to Jodie, or to Holly Hunter, to whom she introduced me. The next thing I knew, I was rushing around, trying to find something. Another first impression gone swimmingly.

Later, I turned to find Rick Richter, the screenwriter, and his wife Susan there unexpectedly. I threw my arms around the pair of them, putting them in a death grip which must've seemed quite strange. It was at that moment that the still photographer took pictures of me with the Richters, we being the so-called "parents of the project." Unfortunately, I was not clad becomingly, appeared to be smuggling coffee grounds in my lower eyelids, and had a look of terror on my face. I'm sure the photos will show up eventually and might be used against me.

I did not know there were liquids available for the crew. Though I did, eventually, figure out what "craft services" had on their table, I assumed it to be snacks and liquids set up for the actors and extras...not for me. I was seriously bewildered and dehydrated.

Towards the end of that first day, around 10:30 p.m., I was asked to stay behind while the grips cleared out, during which time the room where the battery chargers were kept was locked up for the night. So I faced my second day with a puny battery driving my only means of communication and no one who could help.

My car spun out on the icy highway on the way back to Baltimore, and I got lost in the inner city bad neighborhoods, where I was hassled by four large, scary guys at a stop light (my blonde hair and Massachusetts plate glowing in the dark). By the time I got back to Barb and Ethan's house, I was sobbing. And I couldn't go to sleep.

A few hours later, I had to go back to work. Loading crew out from the hotel went a little more smoothly. I think they collectively decided to avoid dealing with me at all costs, and simply get their heinies on the van, pronto.

So off to BWI I went, with my weak-batteried walkie-talkie on, when I heard a discussion from the set about Ms. Hunter's request for plain, non-fat yogurt with no fruit. It seemed my fellow production assistants were canvassing the airport for such yogurt to no avail. One person had found non-fat yogurt with strawberries and there was a big buzz about whether or not that would do. So I piped in that I was just pulling into the airport parking lot and would gladly go to a nearby hotel in search of Ms. Hunter's yogurt. I got a go-ahead and turned to follow exit signs out of the garage. I then heard someone call to me on the walkie and ask me to change channels to discuss something. Just as I glanced down to change channels on my walkie, I got a violent, vibrating page from my beltline. I had hit an intersecting car in the airport garage. BOOM--before I knew what happened.

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